As I mentioned before, my friends and I have been planning surprise activities for each other in the run up to our favourite couple leaving. This week it was the final round and my turn, so the pressure was on. I decided to make us tourists for the night and organise doing something we said we’d always do… the Rickshaw Bus.

The open top bus travels across Hong Kong Island and briefly across the water in Tsim Sha Tsui. As we were all finishing work across the city and Kowloon I decided to arrange a meeting point at the bus stop by the Avenue of Stars (no. 19). Here I forced everyone into embarrassing nicknamed t-shirts…..

…. and then we all got on board for a mere $30.

The bus had a short journey through TST and then went through the Cross-Harbour tunnel to Hong Kong Island side. We nabbed some seats on the open top deck which made for a very interesting experience through the tunnel. Spoiler alert: you can’t make your voice echo. We cracked out our beers and bus picnic and enjoyed the ride.

Turns out it’s a little difficult to eat salami, crackers and hummus as your driving at 30mph with the wind flowing through your everything (middle class problems) so we saved our picnic for the time being. The bus took us through Causeway Bay, Admiralty and Central – it was really cool to see some of Hong Kong’s most famous buildings from a new angle. Unfortunately your $30 only takes you as far as a terminus so after about an hour we were booted off a Central Pier. Here we grabbed the rest of our picnic and watched some live music on the harbour. A perfect end to the evening.

I’d love to do the whole route on the bus to see the rest of the journey through Wan Chai and the remainders of TST. You can buy hop-on hop-off tickets for the day for about $200 but I think our journey was the perfect length and we still got to see the best bits.